Between Okinawa and the Marianas: De/Militarization in the Post 9/11 Pacific

The Pentagon projects that at least 8,000 military personnel will be relocated from Okinawa to Guam by the year 2012. Okinawa's demilitarization has thus meant re-militarization for Guam, an unincorporated United States territory and the southernmost island in the Mariana Islands. At the same time, the U.S. government is in the process of "federalizing" the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) through its attempts to manage the CNMI's immigration laws. The CNMI, a politically decolonized entity with commonwealth relations with the US, now faces greater infringement upon its already limited sovereignty. On the other hand, Guam and Okinawa have yet to see their respective decolonization, nationalist and peace movements come to fruition. Further, several settler and stateless groups have emerged in the CNMI arguing for greater civil liberties and rights. How might we make sense, then, of competing civil-rights, human rights and indigenous rights' discourses in these island archipelagos? How might we address and analyze American and Japanese militarist attempts to control their "overseas borders" in the post 9/11 era? Drawing from activist, government, media and military sources, I offer preliminary reflections on the ways in which militarization and demilitarization have come to be understood among the societies of Okinawa and the Mariana Islands.